Both of the men who hope to be elected prime minister of Israel tomorrow say they want peace with the Palestinians, but their visions of what that peace should be and how it should be achieved could not be more diametrically opposed.
Frontrunner Ariel Sharon, a former army general and minister of defense, carries the banner for the hawkish right-wing Likud party, which ironically is the one that concluded the only two peace treaties with Israel's Arab neighbors.
Trailing Sharon in the polls by between 16 and 20 percentage points is another general and Israel's most highly decorated soldier, caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He has espoused a view of peace that has gone nowhere and has earned him accusations of betraying Israel's strategic interests.
But while Israel's voters ponder what sort of peace they may want and reflect on how important their national security is to them, there is a view that, if Sharon wins, peace will take a backseat to security.
"There is practically no chance that even the facade or the pretense of a peace process will be maintained," if Sharon is elected tomorrow, says Mark Heller, an analyst at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
It is not difficult to understand why Heller would say that.
Sharon has indicated that he would turn the rules of the game on their head, if elected. He began last month by announcing that, as far as he was concerned, the seminal 1993 Oslo partial peace accords with the Palestinians were "dead."
These accords, which gave the Palestinian Authority partial control over territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, were based on a principle of "land for peace."
But Sharon has backed away from that tradeoff.
A Palestinian state, which he considers inevitable, would be no larger than the territory now controlled by the Palestinian Authority. That is to say, about two-thirds of the Gaza Strip and 42 percent of the West Bank.
As an ingenious solution to the lack of territorial contiguity that would imply, Sharon has proposed digging a tunnel to link Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem in the West Bank, with Nablus, which lies further north.
At the same time, Sharon rejects giving up control over the Jordan Valley, which separates Israel from Jordan, or of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war.
On the Golan, however, Sharon has been ambiguous in his statements, and Heller said he had left himself a "little room to maneuver" on that issue.
Sharon is also squarely at odds with Barak over the future of the Jewish settlements which as a minister he scattered through the Palestinian territories. Sharon says they will stay where they are; Barak wants to dismantle some of them and regroup them in fewer, larger concentrations.
Effectively, Sharon has ruled out any expectation of reaching a peace accord with the Palestinians in the near term.
Instead, he talks about negotiating some sort of "non-belligerence" pact, after which further talks would aim at a series of phased, long-term interim accords.
In contrast, the seemingly unflappable Barak said following the inconclusive end of marathon peace talks in Egypt last week that the two sides were so close to an agreement that "we could almost see it."
And he promised to resume negotiations as soon as the election is over, talking as if he has not seen the opinion polls.
Sharon's criticism of Barak's peace overtures is that the premier has been trying to resolve the decades-old conflict all at once when certain of the issues, such as that of Jerusalem, appear to Sharon to be incapable of solution in the short-term.
Barak has been working along the general lines of a proposal set out last year by then-US president Bill Clinton and which is still very much based on the concept of land for peace.
Under that plan, the new Palestinian state would comprise all of the Gaza Strip and all but 5 or 6 percent of the West Bank, as well as the Arab quarters of Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem.
As a tradeoff, the Palestinians would renounce the right of an estimated 3.7 million of their compatriots to return to their former homes in what is now Israel.
Like Barak, Sharon has already said categorically that no "right of return" would be recognized, but unlike Barak says Israel must maintain its sovereignty over the whole city of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, the most sacred site in Judaism, and the third holiest site in Islam.
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